Susan J. Shaw

About Susan J. Shaw

Susan J. Shaw is a medical anthropologist specializing in ethnicity, health disparities, social movements, and the political economy of health in the United States. Her book, Governing How We Care: Contesting Community and Defining Difference in U.S. Public Health Programs, analyzes local struggles over community health as a window onto the complex meanings of governance, citizenship, and identity formation. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over six years in a New England city, this book places community health, a critically understudied area, at the center of analyses of contemporary transformations in governing. In domains that include HIV prevention, cultural differences in primary health care, chronic disease, and health care reform, her work explores the multiple and unanticipated effects of contemporary neoliberal policies in the U.S. inner city. She examines the ways in which community responses to marginalization can lead to new kinds of identities formed in part through collective struggles around health issues. Dr. Shaw recently concluded a four-year, NIH-funded study of cultural differences, health literacy, and chronic disease management among four ethnic groups in the northeastern U.S. She is currently PI on the RxHL study, a four-year follow-up study that looks at how people with low health literacy cope with increasing costs and changes in their medication coverage (R01HL120907: Medication Adherence, Health Literacy and Cultural Health Beliefs in a Massachusetts Community Health Center).